Patrick McGuinness

Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned...

Iwas made​ in the small industrial town of Bouillon, in the Belgian Ardennes, where my mother came from and most of the family still lives. One aunt and uncle lived opposite, another lived forty kilometres away on the Luxembourg border, and our cousins lived next door. My mother was the only one of her siblings or close relatives to leave, but when she did she went far enough away to make up...

It was the inattentive eye that saw them best:breeze-block vases with their tapered waists,their smoky pouts. They were modest,

middle-distant; they had the permanenceof grey things: seen but rarely noticed;or, if noticed, only once.

When the dynamite sapped them, a rippleclimbed their flanks; their mouthswere trying to say something difficult.

They hesitated, as if falling was a choice,and when...

It grew in the hallway beside the pot plant,the ashtray, and the Yellow Pages left ajar.It started under floorboards, unspooledbetween the carpets and their waferings of underlay.

It tracked the skirtings, spined down corners,knew the smell of slippers, insoles crumblingat the heel or toe; it knew the frayed shadowsthat we threw: the address book’s fading numbers

and the crossed-out...

In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. His characters are suspicious of any claim that there is an omniscient history.